Category Archives: Multiculturalism

Muslims rebuff Tebbit’s rant on culture

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslims rebuff Tebbit’s rant on culture

Morning Star, 20 August 2005

Muslims condemned a primitive attack on their culture from crackpot Tory bigot Lord Tebbit yesterday.

The Tory former chairman denounced multiculturalism and claimed that there had been “no real advances” in art, literature or science in the Muslim world in the last 500 years. The venomous peer proclaimed that the London bombings may never have happened if the nation had listened to his demand 15 years ago that British Asians must pass the “cricket test” and support the England team. In an interview with ePolitix.com, he claimed that multiculturalism was now in danger of undermining British society.

The Muslim Council of Britain accused him of a “blinkered and dangerous” attempt to reduce the terrorism problem to simply blaming multiculturalism. The spokesman conceded that science had not progressed in the Muslim world as it had in the West. However, this was caused not by Islam itself, but “a restrictive interpretation of the faith by too many Muslims”.

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Mindless diatribe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Tory relic Lord Tebbit claims, in his mindless diatribe against Islam, that communities have to look forward alongside other communities rather than backwards to where they came from. In saying this, he exemplifies his own backwardness by harking back to a society that he imagines existed in Britain before multicultural society. In fact, such a society hadn’t existed for at least 2,000 years. People from different cultures, with different religions and mother tongues, had arrived and settled throughout that time. They became part of society while retaining respect for their roots and keeping alive aspects of their own cultural heritage.”

Morning Star, 20 August 2005

Tebbit attacks ‘unreformed’ Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Semi house trained polecatIslam is so unreformed there have been no real advances in art, literature, science or technology in the Muslim world in 500 years, Lord Tebbit says.

Multiculturalism is in danger of undermining British society, the former Conservative Party chairman also tells the e-politix website.

In the 1980s he questioned the loyalty of immigrants who backed cricket teams from their countries of origin. Now he says if he had been heeded it might have stopped the London bombings.

“To reduce the terrorism problem to simply blaming multiculturalism is blinkered and indeed dangerous,” a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain said.

BBC News, 18 August 2005

See also ePolitix.com, 18 August 2005

Defend multiculturalism – Keith Vaz

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In an interview in the current edition of the Parliamentary Monitor magazine, Keith Vaz expresses fears that “communities and not individuals” are being blamed for the attacks of July 7 and 21. Revealing that he has received scores of racially motivated “hate mail”, Vaz says that the drive for multiculturalism should continue despite growing fears about Muslim extremism.

“There is no better place to celebrate multiculturalism than Britain in 2005,” says the Labour MP.”Multiculturalism is different cultures and different religions within one society. And I would defend it right to the end. It has been a great benefit to our country – to our great cities. It has given Britain the face it has.”

ePolitix.com, 17 August 2005

Ban hijab not Bakri – Rod Liddle

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Rod LiddleRod Liddle finds it ironic that “it is the Charles Moores of our world – the high church, High Tory Right – who are the most persuasive and clear-headed in their public antipathy towards Islam and towards those who would, under the banner of political correctness, afford this still primitive creed some sort of equivalence with post-reformation Christianity”.

On the other side are “those Left-liberal multiculturalist commentators who continue to delude themselves that Islam as a whole is easily compatible with the Western notions of freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, democracy and equality. As a result, we now have a false dichotomy – between something called moderate Islam and this rogue creature, extremist Islam”.

Banning a marginal figure like Omar Bakri is, from Liddle’s perspective, irrelevant. It is Islam as a whole that has to be taken on, by “ensuring that Muslim schoolchildren receive a secular education and banishing the hijab”.

Spectator, 13 August 2005

I’m always amused by these commentators who preach the virtues of “post-reformation Christianity”. This would include the US Christian Right and Ian Paisley, would it?

End this chorus of intolerance

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“At one level, the attack on multiculturalism is no more than a refined, middle-class version of ‘Paki-bashing’. Yet people who ought to know better have joined in the chorus of intolerance. To demand that Muslims abandon their way of life – what they eat, how they dress, which way they choose their husbands and wives – is to make a frontal assault upon their faith.”

Roy Hattersley in the Guardian, 12 August 2005

‘Muslims are not cockroaches’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

It may like to call itself proudly the “birthplace of human rights”, but when it comes to dealing with Islamist clerics, France is rarely reluctant to set such scruples aside.

The country waited only days after the London bombings before summarily expelling its first two radical preachers. It has since sent two more packing and plans to deport a total of some two dozen by the end of this month.

Underlining a longstanding difference in approach between London and Paris, an interior ministry official said France had “no problem whatsoever” in deporting anyone accused of inflaming anti-western feeling – even if they had French citizenship and were formally recognised as preachers by the Muslim community.

The planned arrests and expulsions follow repeated statements by the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, since the July 7 London attacks that France “must and will act against radical preachers capable of influencing the youngest and most weak-minded”.

Fundamental rights such as freedom of speech, that in Britain have, until very recently, protected the controversial clerics, count for precious little in France when the speech concerned is considered an incitement to hatred or violence.

Guardian, 11 August 2005

Irshad Manji attacks multiculturalism, calls for less tolerance

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Irshad Manji Trouble With Islam“As Westerners bow down before multiculturalism, we anesthetize ourselves into believing that anything goes. We see our readiness to accommodate as a strength…. Radical Muslims, on the other hand, see our inclusive instincts as a form of corruption that makes us soft and rudderless. They believe the weak deserve to be vanquished. Paradoxically, then, the more we accommodate to placate, the more their contempt for our ‘weakness’ grows. An ultimate paradox may be that in order to defend our diversity, we’ll need to be less tolerant.”

Irshad Manji in the New York Times, 9 August 2005

Characteristic of Manji’s method is her reference to the play “Corpus Christi” by Terrence McNally, in which Jesus was depicted as a gay man. She tells us how in 1999 “Christians protested the show and picketed its European debut in Edinburgh, a reasonable exercise in free expression. But Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Muslim preacher and a judge on the self-appointed Sharia Court of the United Kingdom, went further: he signed a fatwa calling for Mr. McNally to be killed….”

Except that, if Bakri had indeed called for McNally to be killed, he would certainly have been prosecuted. In fact, what Bakri did was issue a fatwa “authorising” McNally’s execution by the Islamic state, while making it clear that individuals had no right to carry out the sentence. In other words, short of the establishment of Bakri’s version of the caliphate, which is not exactly an imminent threat, McNally was in no danger at all.

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‘Dire results of theory of multiculturalism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The theory of multiculturalism and its malevolent companion, political correctness, arrived on these shores from North America and was quickly taken up by the liberal, urban political elite. These theories were foisted on the British people without any consultation and the terrible consequences are only appearing now…. A Muslim festival like Eid is given as much importance as Christmas or Easter. There is something very wrong here.

“Minority groups, especially those from the Indian sub-continent, were encouraged not to integrate or mix, but to keep their own customs as though the UK did not exist…. So in many of our cities we have a society within the wider society with a religion, Islam, which often seems to the outsider to be more of a political movement than a way to being at peace with God and one’s neighbour. This society within a society has been encouraged to revel in its alleged victimhood, and, due to its lack of maturity, has never looked at its own faults but blames outsiders for all its ills…..

“The day that Muslims can accept rational criticism without the predictable cries of ‘Islamophobia’ will be the day when they are finally accepted into British society like the descendants of other immigrant groups over the centuries. Fear of western secular society and its achievements is perhaps due to the nature of Islam itself.”

Letter in the Herald, 9 August 2005